


Thunderbolt

by took_skye



Series: Living For the Night [14]
Category: Criminal Minds
Genre: Alternate Universe - Noir, F/M, POV First Person, POV Male Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-01-16
Updated: 2011-01-16
Packaged: 2017-10-22 20:18:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,087
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/242177
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/took_skye/pseuds/took_skye
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Reid brings up the topic of Elle's son, Jack, and the boy's father he shows his intelligence...and a bit of his stupidity.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Thunderbolt

  
_"Fact is not enough, opinion is too much." ~ Todor Simeonov_

***///***

I awake to the smells of bacon and, for a split second, I’m a boy again. I’m back at home with my mother before she grew too ill to be a mother and she’s cooking me breakfast because today’s a good day.

I roll, stuff my face into the pillows, and breathe deep. It’s a heady mix of sweat, sex, and cheap perfume trapped in over-starched cloth. The smells remind me that I’m not a boy. I’m not home and my mother’s still crazy as ever.

But the bacon’s real and so’s the singer’s voice as it sings, croons, in a language I don’t understand from the kitchen. It’s melodious, soft, feminine. Nothing like you’d expect from the woman, but suited to her nevertheless.

“Morning.” She senses me as I step out of the bedroom, pulling my shirt over my head as I go. “I hope you have an appetite because I’ve already started the food.”

“Um…yeah, I do. Actually, I tend to eat a lot when able.”

Elle smiles to me, eyes skimming my form, then smirks. “Then how come you’re so skinny.”

“Because I’m not usually able.”

She gives a laugh and turns back to the skillet.

“So…uh…your son…” I know she has one, she spoke of him last night and there are a number of pictures of the boy at different ages around the house.

“Yeah?” The bacon is transferred by fork and fingers to a large plate. Elle turns as her mouth nips at her thumb, sucking the grease from it.

“Are you, uh, expecting him or d-do you…you know, uh, have to pick him up?”

She plucks a small piece of bacon from the plate. “Jack is with a friend of mine for the _whole_ day.” The playful wink as she pops the meat in her mouth tells me she thinks I’m suggesting something I’m not.

For a moment I nearly lose the plot in the workings of her lips and tongue as she eats, but a quick look down sets me right.

My eyes return to hers. “Not with his father?

“No.”

“Can…uh…can I ask why not?”

There’s a swallow; her lips thin and brows arch. “You want to know why Jack isn’t with his father?”

I nod.

The brows furrow. “What the fuck do you even care?”

“I just…” I shrug, “I think a boy ought to know his father, Elle. Be close, spend time with him…uh…bond. And I’m sure that, um, Hotch would like to spend as much time with his son as possible.”

Elle stares at me as if I were a puzzle in an ancient language. I’ve said, done, something beyond her comprehension but I don’t know what. I’ve said nothing technical, nothing with numbers or having to do with theories put forth by philosophers or innovators or theorists. Her confusion confuses.

“What? Have…have I said something…wrong?” My eyebrows arch as my eyes soften. Did I offend somehow in bringing up their son? My mouth pouts and twitches a little in nerves.

As if the question allowed her to feel it Elle’s eyes, face, mouth grew fierce with defensive rage. “You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about, pendejo!” It’s out in a spit as she spins her back to me and begins to clean up the kitchen. The next words come out muddled, mixed with rushed movements of dishes and food.

Today’s not a good day. It’s a bad one with food thrown out, utensils flung in a sink, and speech so fast and furious it’s akin to an assault.

I can’t follow.

“Elle, English, please,” I beg as I head to her, arms up in the onslaught. “I…I don’t…”

I’m pushed roughly aside, into the fridge where magnets displace and drop their charges.

Shifting of dishes turns into tossing. There’s more Spanish, each word sharper and more complex than the next. Yet even in their incoherence I know they’re all incensed. Elle's furious.

“Elle stop!”

A plate crashes into the sink in response. It's like the last thunder strike in a sudden storm...heart-jumping in its strength yet making calm possible if the winds favor you.

Yet Elle’s body is stock still and gives no indication of the wind.

Instead it warns me about my next move. The stillness, the tension that holds her so hard they almost shake her muscles, says _Proceed With Caution. Contents Under Pressure. Flammable. Explosive._

“Elle…” I lead with a testing voice. I get a growling sigh. “I’m sorry I just…”

“Where the hell do you get off?” She snaps. “We get high and fuck once and suddenly you’re the big man? You know what’s best for me and my son?!”

“N-No, that’s…”

“Shut up!” Her hand dives for a small paring knife, pulls it from the counter and into her possession. “Listen carefully, punta, Hotch doesn’t know, he’s not going to know.”

“Put the knife down.”

Whether a comfort or a threat I know her taking the knife’s an empty gesture.

“No one does, in fact.” She proceeds with no acknowledgement. Her wrist turns up, exposes itself, in twisting the tiny blade out at me. “So how do you?”

“I just do. Now put the knife down before I take it from you.”

She sneers, huffs, smirks, and challenges. “You think you’re man enough go ahead and try.”

I’m not overly strong, I never have been. In a straight fist fight I’ll probably lose to most, man or woman. I’m slight. But I am fast. On my feet, with my hands, and in my mind. I use all three to one-up her.

She’s not truly prepared to stab me, only thinks she is, and I use the hesitation to get closer…closer. Grab the wrist and twist just hard enough to get her grimacing and loosening her grip on the knife. A simple knock of bodies and, when the blade drops, I pull her into me. It ends with her back at my chest, wrists in my hands behind her, and both of us leaning against the fridge.

“I don’t want to fight, Elle.” I assure softly in her ear.

She shuffles her feet just so, later, she can say I didn’t have her completely. “Sure gotta funny way of showing it,” she grumbles, proudly defiant but no longer angry.

My lips slip into a smile at her lobe. “I wasn’t the one waving the knife around.”

“No you were the one telling a woman how to raise her child.” I feel the smirk in her voice.

“That was wrong of me. I apologize.” I let her go. “But…uh…You should tell him, Elle.”

She shakes her head as she turns. “No, I…”

“He has a right to know.”

“He has a right to shit.” It’s her instinct answer and she sighs it off. “Raising Jack with no father is easier than raising him with one that’s barely around and doesn’t want him. Doesn't want kids.”

These points I can’t argue. I had a father, for ten years I had him, and then he left. Many times after that I’d wished I never had him to start because, that way, I wouldn’t know what I’d lost.

“Elle…I…” Am at a loss for words.

She sighs once more, but unlike those before it this one grows more human with her eyes. She traps the edge of her bottom lip in her teeth a moment, looking me over as she does. “How did you know?”

“Know?”

“About Jack’s father. That it’s…”

“Hotch?”

“Yeah.”

I smile a touch. “It’s a little, uh, obvious.”

“How?”

“Well…” I realize what’s obvious to me isn’t to her. She thinks she’s kept this secret hidden for years and, maybe, she has with others. “In speaking to Morgan and Garcia I know that you and Hotch have, um, known in each other in some capacity for about seven years but that you two weren’t sexual until Hotch left the force which was about five or six years ago. That works within the timing of Jack’s conception and birth.”

She gives up a smile. “Timing isn’t everything.”

“No, no, you’re right, it’s not. But, um…Did you know that anthropologists have found that children look the most like their birth fathers in their infancy? It sort of relates to keeping males invested in their offspring thus ensuring the survival of mammals in the animal kingdom. See with mammals, monkeys and such, mothers naturally bond with their children. It’s an, uh, an instinct to start and add to that the months of pregnancy and…well…yeah. They also give birth which is pretty much the best insurance that the child is yours seeing as it, well, came out of you. Anyway with fathers it’s different because males, well, they don’t carry their children inside them or give birth. Without that experience of carrying the living being you created inside you they lack that natural bonding period. Add to that that, because they don’t birth their own child, fathers can’t be certain of paternity the way the mother can, and there’s already two strikes against the creation of the father-child bond. So to counteract these doubts and encourage, in fact possibly ensure, bonding between father and child, a baby will share distinguishing features of the father in the beginning of their infancy.” I smile at her, shrug some, and wait for her opinion.

“You lost me at anthropologists,” she confesses with a laugh and shake of her head.

I feel the heat crawl up my neck and face and attempt to hide it in looking down some. “Sorry.”

Her laugh grows soft as she takes the few steps to me. Whatever tension and anger she’d been holding seems to have melted away entirely. “Don’t be sorry, chico, just,” her finger crooks under my chin and lifts my face back to hers, “try less words…and maybe simpler ones.”

I smile and take the time to break down my recent rant, strip it all to bare essentials. Then I speak. “I saw the, uh, picture of Jack on your bureau…the baby one…and he looks just like Hotch. I…I, uh…mean, you know, in his bone structure…facial features and all that.”

“Oh, I see now.” She grins wide. “Smart boy.”

“Um…observant.”

“Both.”

“Then, uh,” I hesitate to start this again, but I feel I must, “can…can I give you…advice?”

“Only if I can tell you to fuck off after.”

“Of course.”

“You should tell him, Elle.” She sighs angry, but I press on this time. “For, um, protection.”

“Protection?” The question is clear in the repeat as she works to fix something she sees in my collar. She’s indulging me this time.

“From, uh, Foyet…Officer Foyet.”

She continues to indulge me with a raising of brows.

I look down to watch Elle’s hands fiddle with my shirt, smoothing it out some. “I think Foyet gets a real joy from agitating Hotch.”

I’m given a dismissive sniff and eye roll for the statement.

“Look it’s pretty clear that they seem to have a long history of…um…not getting along. But I think it’s more than that. I think, you know, that, uh, they um…maybe…see each other is, uh…arch-rivals. Or at least Foyet does and he revels in playing his part.”

“So?”

“So if I figured out Jack was Hotch’s it’s possible others will too. It’s possible Foyet will. And, I…well…I couldn’t stand to think if something happened to you and Jack when I was able to prevent it. And I’m sure Hotch and the others would feel the same whether they know the rest or not.”

I expect to be brutally blown off. To be told I worry too much, that I’m soft and being silly like a woman. That I should fuck off. Instead Elle smiles gently and goes to kiss my lips in some form of reassurance. “Then I suggest you stay close.”

“Will you consider what I’ve said? About telling Hotch?” I will not be placated with a kiss.

“Yes.”

“Good. Thank you.”

I’ll hold off. I’ll stand back and wait for Elle to do the right thing until she gives me no other option. She’s a great mother but a stubborn woman and I won’t allow one trait to risk the other.

***///***

 _"Wisdom: acting on what knowledge you have." ~ Zach Zeisler_


End file.
